“I know nothing about it, messieurs.”  I repeated my little refrain.  “Monsieur captain, remember, if you please, I never saw him till yesterday; he may be Paul de Lorraine for all I know.  But he did not call himself that yesterday.”

“You hell-hound!” Lucas cried.

“Go tell Louis to drive up to the cabaret door, Gaspard,” bade the captain.

Lucas gazed at him as if to tear out of him the truth of the matter.  I think he was still a prey to suspicion of a plot in this, and it paralyzed his tongue.  He so reeked with intrigue that he smelled one wherever he went.  He was much too clever to believe that this arresting officer was simply thick-witted.

“I say no more,” he cried.  “You may spare yourself your lies, the whole crew of you.  I go as your prisoner, but I go as Paul of Lorraine, son of Henry, Duke of Guise.”

He said it with a certain superbness; but the young captain, bourgeois of the bourgeois, did not mean to let himself be put down by any sprig of the noblesse.

“Certainly, if it is any comfort to you,” he retorted.  “But you are very dull, monsieur, not to be aware that your identity is known perfectly to others besides your lackey here and my man.  I did not come to arrest you without a minute description of you from M. de Belin himself.”

“Ventre bleu!” Lucas shouted.  “I wrote the description.  I myself lodged information against Mar.  I came here to make sure you took him.  Carry me before Belin; he will know me.”

I trembled lest the officer could not but see that the man spoke truth.  But I had no need to fear; there is a combination of stupidity and vanity which nothing can move.

“I have no orders to take you to M. de Belin,” he returned calmly.  “So you wrote the description, did you?  Perhaps you will deny that it fits you?”

He read from the paper: 

“’Charles-Andre-Etienne-Marie de St. Quentin, Comte de Mar.  Age, three-and-twenty; figure, tall and slender; was dressed yesterday in black with a plain falling-band; carries his right arm in a sling—­”

“Is my arm in a sling?” Lucas demanded.

“No, in a handcuff,” the captain laughed, at the same moment that his dragoon exclaimed, “His right wrist is bandaged, though.”

“That is nothing!  It is a mere scratch.  I did it myself last night by accident,” Lucas shouted, striving with his hampered left hand to pull the folds apart to show it.  But he could not, and fell silent, wide-eyed, like one who sees the net of fate drawing in about him.  The captain went on reading from his little paper: 

[Illustration:  “HE WAS DEPOSITED IN THE BIG BLACK COACH.”]

“’Fair hair, gray eyes, aquiline nose’—­I suppose you will still tell us, monsieur, that you are not the man?”

“I am not he.  The Comte de Mar and I are nothing alike.  We are both young, tall, yes; but that is all.  He is slashed all up the forearm; my wrist is but scratched with a knife-edge.  He has yellow hair; mine is brown.  His eyes—­”